4 MAY 2019

MARIANNA VON MARTINEZ - AUSTRIA

BORN 4 MAY

Marianna Martines or Marianne von Martinez was an Austrian singer, pianist and composer of the classical period. Her father, Nicolo Martines, grew up there and for a time pursued a career as a soldier. He later changed careers, serving in Vienna as Maestro di Camera (major-domo) at the papal nuncio; that is, the Pope's embassy to the Austrian Empire. For service to the Empire, Marianna's brothers in 1774 acquired a patent of nobility, hence the "von" in the family surname.

Already as a child Martines was good enough to perform before the Imperial court, where according to the Helene Wessely, she "attracted attention with her beautiful voice and her keyboard playing." The adult Marianna was frequently asked to perform before the Empress Maria Theresa.

A number of the works that Martines composed are set for solo voice, and her biographers (Godt, Wessely) conjecture that the first singer of these works was their composer. If so, they constitute further evidence for her ability, as the music shows a "predilection for coloratura passages, leaps over wide intervals and trills indicating that she herself must have been an excellent singer." (Wessely).

Martines wrote a number of secular cantatas and two oratorios to Italian texts. These texts are, naturally enough, the work of her mentor Metastasio. Surviving compositions include four masses, six motets, and three litanies for choir. She wrote in the Italian style, as was typical for the early Classical period in Vienna. Her harpsichord performance practice was compared to the style of C.P.E. Bach. Martines’s compositions were well regarded in her time, and some scholars have suggested that Mozart modeled his 1768 Mass, K. 139, after the "Christe" of Martines’s Mass No. 1 in D major. The Michaelerkirche (St. Michael’s Church, next door to the Martines home), saw a performance of her third mass in 1761. Her fourth mass was completed in 1765.

Though she was an active and highly accomplished performer and composer she never sought an appointed position; it would have been unacceptable for a woman in her social class to seek such employment.

Her last known public appearance was on March 27, 1808, attending a performance of Haydn’s oratorio The Creation conducted by Salieri, in tribute to the now-elderly composer. She died on 13 December 1812 and was buried in St. Mark’s Cemetery.

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Overture in C major by Marianna von Martines

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GABRIELA MOYSEOWICZ  - POLAND 
BORN 4 MAY

Gabriela Maria Moyseowicz  is a Polish composer and pianist. Gabriela played piano skillfully at the age of three. She was recognized as a musical prodigy at music schools in Gdańsk, Bytom and Gliwice. At the age of 13, Gabriela composed a 25-minute concerto for two pianos. She performed it before a group of respected professors-musicians in Kraków and was instantly admitted to the prestigious Academy of Music in Kraków. The concerto was both classical & romantic in style. The work and a number of superb fugues she composed as school-exercises were the first indicators of the scope of the composer’s talent.

A renowned musical critic in Kraków1 highly praised the first atonal composition of Gabriela - “The Piano Sonata No. 1” (1960). Also, the atonal chamber work “Media Vita” (1961) was met with a warm reaction by both the public and musical critics.

From 1962 Moyseowicz attended composition classes at the Academy of Music in Kraków and the State Conservatory in Katowice, and graduated from the latter in 1967. She was awarded the degree of Master of Arts after submitting her second piano concerto. A stormy discussion resulted, among the local professors, over Gabriela’s dissertation in which she had presented her artistic attitudes.

In 1974 Moyseowicz moved to West Berlin, where she worked for thirty years as an organist and choir director at a Catholic church. She made several recordings of her own music for the German Radio (WDR, NDR). Two CDs with orchestral and piano compositions, respectively, were released. Scores of over twenty of Moyseowicz’s compositions were released by a famed musical editor in Berlin.

Although Moyseowicz has always been at ease with the tonal system, it has not been her main artistic goal to compose tonal music. It should be noted the ideas of the “sclerotic avant-garde of the sixties”2 were never attractive for her. From her teens she searched for her own way and managed to develop an original style that has nothing to do with any “modern” or “fashionable” ideas of the second half of the 20th century. Gabriela’s compositions are thoroughly atonal, but listeners have, very often, an impression to hear the tonal music. It is a secret of Gabriela’s workshop that she is able to extract from the highly complex sound material sequences of ear-friendly modern contemporary classical music. The composer uses instruments with the great respect to their design, destination and limitations, yet she produces extraordinary effects. Her dazzling music is rich in invention and imagination. “Gabriela Moyseowicz is a genial composer whose work merits more attention”6. The opinions like this have been expressed on several occasions by musical professionals and music lovers. The work of Gabriela Moyseowicz has been subjected to analyses by several authors.

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Klaviersonata N.3 by Gabriela Moyseowicz

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